A. S. Byatt · 1990 · road
A. S. Byatt's Booker-winning 1990 novel. Roland Michell finds two draft letters tucked in a book in the London Library, written by a Victorian poet everyone believed was happily married. Tracing them takes him and Maud Bailey to Lincolnshire, the Yorkshire coast and Brittany - following, without quite realising it, the same route the poets took.
- 1London
In the London Library in 1986, reading Ash's own copy of Vico, Roland finds two unsent drafts of a letter to a woman who is not his wife - and pockets them, which is theft, and the beginning of everything.
- 2Lincoln
The Women's Resource Centre, and Dr Maud Bailey, the LaMotte scholar - cool, precise and related to the poet by blood, which turns out to matter more than either of them expects.
- 3Seal Court
The Bailey family house in Lincolnshire, where Christabel lived out her later years - and where, in a cold conservatory, the entire correspondence is found in a doll's cot under the bed she died in.
- 4Whitby
They follow Ash's 1859 Yorkshire journey to the jet shops on the harbour, where he bought a brooch and sent it south with a poem - and a shopkeeper recognises the same brooch in Maud's hair.
- 5Boggle Hole
The cove on the Yorkshire coast where Ash collected specimens in rock pools, and where Roland and Maud, working out that the poets came here together, stop being scholars for the afternoon.
- 6Kernemet
The LaMotte family manor in Brittany, where Christabel went when she was pregnant - and Sabine de Kercoz's journal, opening in October 1859, tells the modern scholars what the letters never say.
- 7Finistere
The Bay of the Dead and the drowned city of Is, the western end of Brittany and of the search - the country that produced the Melusina poem, and where the trail runs out into folklore and water.
- 8London
Back for the last act: a graveyard at night in a storm, a wooden box opened at Ash's head, and the letter that answers the question - read by everyone except the two people it was written between.